A new office productivity tool

OpenOffice.org 2.0 was just released. If you've heard of OpenOffice.org but haven't tried it yet, this may be a good time to check it out.

If you do, here are a few things you might want to check out; you'll probably find a number of others.

• It's quite easy to turn any of your documents into PDF.
  
• Draw is an easy way to do vector drawings, giving you nicer results and presumably smaller files than Paint.
  
• Look for the Styles and Formatting button. Discover how much easier it can be to create structured text documents than it is to use so-called "direct formatting."
  
• Check out the new and flexible database functionality in Base.
  

I've used PostgreSQL to track data for some projects. While it's industrial-strength, it lacked a bit of friendliness for creating queries and reports for the casual user. Last night, I opened Base and tried to connect to my last PostgreSQL database. Within a very few minutes, I had connected and was creating new queries. I then opened a Calc spreadsheet I had defined as a data source and was able to generate reports, again quite quickly and easily. This may be the biggest benefit for me in OpenOffice.org 2.0.